Coldfall Wood

Dear Readers, after many months of trudging through the mud during the winter, it’s astonishing how the wood has now dried out. It’s true that we haven’t had any serious rain for several months (though some is forecast overnight), but even so the clay soil has turned into a miniature relief-map of ruts and runnels. Still, the place is alive with bird song – robins, song thrushes, blue tits and nuthatches to name but a few.

Someone has moved some branches to protect this multi-coloured group of hybrid bluebells from trampling, and very pretty they are too. There’s not a sign of the wood anemones that I remember from back in 2011 when I first arrived in East Finchley, though – maybe they’re hiding out in some of the less-trodden corners.

The hornbeam is flowering – it’s monoecious, which means that it has male and female flowers on the same tree. In the photo below, the prominent catkin right in the middle is the male one, but on the lower right-hand side you can see a collection of green slender outward-pointing ‘seeds’ which are the female flowers. As in many trees which have both male and female flowers, all the trees in the area are likely to set seed at the same time, so that there will be at least some cross-pollination. There might also be a slight time-lapse between the different sexes on the same tree, to prevent self-pollination. The sex-lives of plants are extremely confusing, and don’t even get me started on fungi.

Male and Female hornbeam catkins/flowers

In fact, there are flowers and catkins everywhere today. The crack willow has ridiculously long catkins (these are the female ones)

And here are some completely different catkins – this is black poplar (Populus nigra), though I’m not sure whether it’s the vanishingly rare native subspecies (ssp betulifolia) or the more commonly seen hybrid black poplar. It would be great if it was the first, as this is our rarest native tree, but let’s see – I’ll keep you all posted.

And what a fabulous year it’s been for the blackthorn. I have never seen so many flowers.

Blackthorn

And I rather like the catkins on the sycamore too.

I had to have a quick look at what I’m beginning to think of as ‘my’ wildflower bed in the far corner of the fields, although I am a bit nervous about the encroachment of the Japanese Knotweed, which seems to increase year on year. It looks to me as if children have been thrashing their way through it, which will only help to spread the stuff. Still, there are plenty of plants in flower already:

White Deadnettle

Green alkanet

Forget-me-not

Red campion

More green alkanet

However, it was on the walk home that I noticed that the whole path was full of flies. What a twit I am! I’ve been hoping to see St Mark’s Flies (Bibio marcii) – these jet-black, slightly hairy flies are so-called because they normally emerge around about St Mark’s day, which is 25th April. The males have enormous eyes, largely because they fly around at head height looking for females to mate with. The females have much smaller eyes because presumably all they have to do is avoid predators. Look at the beautiful iridescence on the wings of this chap – like pastel-coloured stained glass.

St Mark’s Fly (Bibio marci)

I soon realised that the flies were all over the path, which led to some very delicate ‘tiptoe through the tulips’ type manoeuvres.

I think the fly on the grass is just sorting out his wings preparatory to his maiden flight….

And here is some wobbly film of one of the St Mark’s Flies having a little wash and brush-up. You’re welcome 🙂

And now I realise that the ‘little hoverfly’ that I mentioned in my Saturday post was actually a St Mark’s Fly, and furthermore, the reason that the starlings have been behaving in a most peculiar manner (hawking and diving around very energetically) is because they’re catching these little chaps by the beakful. Doh.

A blooming St Mark’s Fly.

Goodness Readers, although East Finchley Cemetery is a much posher, more manicured cemetery than my favourite, St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, it certainly has some very trees. Today, the rose-garden was looking a bit bare, but the trees more than made up for it.

One of the disadvantages of roses is that, although they look and smell wonderful when they’re in flower, they are very uninteresting for the rest of the year (and many varieties need a fair bit of looking after as well, what with the pruning and the feeding and the keeping an eye open for black spot). Furthermore, this part of the cemetery, which has an ornamental pond and then a small stream running down the middle, has been a bit of a problem for the landscape gardeners – the bit at the bottom was a quagmire earlier this year, though the weeping willows loved it.

However, there are some very pretty trees here. There is the usual Kanzan cherry tree, not my favourite but very ebullient.

Kanzan cherry. Look at all those petals!

There are some magenta-coloured crab apples too – I think this is purple crab (Malus x purpurea) but am happy to be corrected, as always.

But I think my favourite is this tree, which I think could be Siberian crab (Malus baccata), possibly the Lady Northcliffe variety? I think that it might be the prettiest blossom tree I’ve ever seen, what with those cherry-pink buds. Let me know what you think, you clever people!

Elsewhere, I find an Indian horse chestnut (Aesculus indica) – it has much narrower, more dainty leaves than ‘our’ horse chestnut, and is smaller and more delicate. I love the way that this cemetery makes a feature of its specimen trees – some of those in St Pancras and Islington are rather swallowed up with undergrowth, though this is much better for wildlife. I’m lucky to have both types of cemetery within a twenty-minute walk.

Indian horse chestnut (Aesculus indica)

And the pollen from this fir tree is absolutely everywhere. No wonder my husband’s nose is twitching. I’m thinking it looks most like a Nordmann Fir (i.e. the one that’s used as a Christmas tree), and if so these are the male flowers.

The ‘willow garden’ is coming on nicely, with lots of spring flowers, including this rather nice white Dicentra.

And the tree below rather caught me out – it’s a bay tree. I’d never seen one in flower before. What a twit.

I always stop to pay homage to the Cedar of Lebanons as well. What magnificent trees they are, planted when the cemetery first opened in 1854. I love the barrel-shaped cones, which gradually disintegrate, allowing the seeds to fall.

And the monkey-puzzle tree is putting on lots of new growth too – look at those cones! Apparently they will break up on the tree, rather than falling on someone’s head.

While I was admiring the monkey puzzle, my husband spotted that I had a hitchhiker – this bee. I’m thinking that it’s an orange-tailed mining bee (Andrena haemorrhoa) but these are tricky critters to ID to species level. As it likes south-facing grassy slopes to nest in, there will be plenty of opportunities for it in the cemetery – in some places the turf is kept very short, but there are also areas that are more overgrown.

The cemetery is a hot-spot for bats, too. What a shame that it closes at 4.30 p.m! But then there are signs outside prohibiting alcohol and barbecues, so I imagine that it has been the site of what I loosely describe as ‘urban vibrance’. Maybe it’s just as well that the bats, birds and bees have the whole place to themselves as dusk falls.

A fine array of bat boxes

Dear Readers, it was the most beautiful spring today, and while the cherry plums in the cemetery have mostly lost their blossom, the heavy candy-floss pink flowers of the cherry trees are just starting to emerge. It’s a shame that many of the prettiest are behind fencing at the moment, while the cemetery tries to turn yet another area of rough scrub into a site for graves, but nonetheless the tree is still exuberant. The blossom on these trees can sometimes seem almost too much: I suspect that these trees are of the Kanzan variety, with each blossom having up to 28 petals. There is a road close to where I used to live in Islington which was lined with these trees on each side: when the blossom started to fall, it could be like scuffling through a thin layer of pink snow.

The cherry plums have lost every last flower now, and are instead glorying in their copper foliage.

The cow parsley is just starting to flower in the woodland grave area, and is already attracting pollinators, like this little hoverfly. The photo is not good enough to identify the species, but it does give an indication of how varied this group of insects can be – at first glance you’d think this was a flying ant.

I had to pause for a quick look at the swamp cypress, which appears to have been in suspended animation for weeks. Not for much longer, though! I can’t wait until it’s decked out in fluorescent green.

I had to pause for a quick look at the cherry laurel by the main path – it is covered in strange, spidery flowers, and has a most nose-tingling smell, somehow dusty and honey-ish at the same time.

Another hoverfly was sunning itself on the leaves. I’m going to hazard a guess and say that this is probably a female Eristalsis pertinax. The males of this fly defend territories around flowering plants, and I imagine that the cherry laurel must be a very appealing site. The young go by the appealing name of ‘rat-tailed maggots’, and live in drainage ditches and other stagnant water: the ‘tail’ is actually a breathing tube.

And here’s an insect that I haven’t come across before. Superficially it looks rather like a shield bug, but it is narrower in the body and has much thicker, more pronounced antennae. This is a box bug (Gonocerus acuteangulatus) and it isn’t named after the plant directly but after Box Hill in Surrey (which was, admittedly, named after the box hedges that grew there).  The bug was considered endangered, and in 1990 it was known only in the area around the eponymous Box Hill, but since then it has expanded its range to most of south-east England. It seems to have expanded the variety of foodplants that it eats to include hawthorn, bramble and rose, and I predict a sunny future for it as it munches its way northwards.

The dandelions are still out in force.

The leaves on the horse chestnut are getting bigger every week.

And the first flowers are opening on the hawthorn.

But what I’ve really noticed this week are the bluebells. The vast majority of the ones in the cemetery are hybrids, and they come in the most astonishing array of colours. I doubt that the cemetery was ever a pristine environment for bluebells, and in fact I suspect that if there weren’t hybrids here, there wouldn’t be any bluebells at all.

  The primroses are doing their hybridizing thang as well. In the beds at the entrance to the cemetery there is the most extraordinary range of primulas and polyanthus, and I suspect that they are all cross-breeding and coming up with multiple varieties across the rest of the area. Genetic exuberance is certainly in evidence here.

In one of the sunnier parts of the cemetery I saw, in quick succession, a brimstone butterfly, a peacock butterfly, and a male orange-tip. I managed to get photos of two out of the three, which wasn’t bad considering how quickly the brimstone was flying. They apparently emerge from hibernation from March onwards, and will only be on the wing till May, so I cherished this glimpse of a butterfly in a tearing hurry!

Brimstone butterfly(Gonepteryx rhamni)

And then we almost trod on two peacock butterflies in quick succession, both of them sunning themselves on the path. These adults will have been hibernating over winter, and are now looking for someone to mate with, and somewhere to lay their eggs. They looked very ragged and tired, poor things.

The orange-tip will have been very happy to see the abundance of garlic-mustard which has popped up everywhere, and is now coming into flower. It’s good that there is so much of the stuff, as the caterpillars are cannibalistic and so the female normally lays each egg on a different plant – when an egg is laid, the female also deposits a pheromone which will prevent other females from laying there. Furthermore, the females will only lay their eggs on plants which are already in flower, but will also refuse to lay if the flower is starting to age. This is an insect which wants to give their young the very best start in life, for sure.

Male orange-tip (Anthrocharis cardamines) (Photo One)

Garlic mustard and lesser celandine

I couldn’t resist getting a photo of this watchful crow, and I rather liked the backlit dandelions too.

And for my final butterfly of the day, here’s a newly-minted speckled wood (Parage aegeria). These are woodland butterflies, flitting through the dappled shade. The males are fiercely territorial, and spend a lot of time flying into the air to investigate every insect that goes past. If it’s another male, an aerial battle will take place that could last up to 90 minutes. The battles are fiercest if the incumbent male has already been visited by a female – presumably this proves that his territory is a good spot. What a lot of hard work this reproduction business is.

Speckled wood (Parage aegeria)

And so, it seems that, with the arrival of flies and bugs and butterflies, and with bluebells and garlic mustard springing up all over the cemetery, we are now into what I think of as ‘mid-spring’, the period when the battle to mate and rear young and get pollinated is at its height. All I need now is the arrival of the house martins to know that spring is fading, and summer is beginning.

The view along Cypress Avenue

Dear Readers, Christmas was pretty much cancelled for lots of people yesterday at 4 p.m. in the UK, just as most people had stocked up on food for the people who were allowed to travel to see their relatives for five days over the holidays. Instead, in areas with Tier 4 (pretty much all of the south-east including London) no household mixing is allowed (unless you have formed a support bubble) and everything except essential retail is closed. In other parts of the country, 2 households can mix on Christmas Day only. If you’re in Tier 4 you shouldn’t travel to lower tiers, but of course everyone jumped onto a train or into a car and headed off to escape the lockdown which started at midnight last night. My heart goes out to everyone who had made plans and wanted to finally be with the ones they loved after this terrible year. The numbers of cases are frightening, though. My main ire is with the powers that be, who have ignored calls from scientists for London to be completely locked down since October. Only a few days ago, Boris Johnson was mocking Kier Starmer when he called for household mixing restrictions to be cancelled.

Anyhow, here we are. For me personally it makes very little difference, what with having no parents left. We were planning a quiet Christmas, and that’s exactly what we’ll have. I am planning to get out for a walk whenever the weather cooperates even a tiny bit, however, and so today we found ourselves back in East Finchley Cemetery (which confusingly is largely owned by Westminster City Council). Maybe it’s this Westminster connection rather than the Barnet one which makes it such a posh place – everywhere is well manicured and there are a plethora of graves with extravagant headstones. Angels and Celtic crosses abound.

I found this headstone particularly interesting – I’ve not seen anything like it before. The wheel at the bottom looks like a Buddhist symbol for the wheel of reincarnation, but I’m not sure about the boss in the middle – could it be a lotus? Let me know if you have any thoughts, I haven’t included the details of the person buried because there weren’t any clues, and also I try not to be too personal out of respect.

There is some very fine carving, particularly of plants, as in the headstones below. What patience must have been required to create them!

But what I like most are the ones that are intensely personal. Have a look at this cricket-themed gravestone, for example.

And who was ‘Harry’? And why is this all that is on his gravestone? Did his family run out of money to put more details, or was his name all that you needed to know about him? So many mysteries….

And then there is that magnificent Italianate crematorium which is still largely fenced off, and probably will be until the pandemic is over.

But look at the trees! This is the home of some fine Cedars of Lebanon, some of which are covered in pine cones this year.

A gnarled and ancient-looking tree  has what looks to me very much like home for a woodpecker – I will have to check it later in the year to see if anyone has taken up residence.

Small flocks of redwings go twinkling away as soon as I get within a hundred metres. Was there ever a shyer thrush? I am even prouder of my devastatingly good portrait captured in the other cemetery yesterday.

I am very fond of this fine angel who is one of a row of very fine tombs beside the entrance. I think that the ivy rather enhances the overall effect.

But before I forget, here is a rather surprising sight. It’s 46 degrees and the middle of December, and yet, on Bedford Road in East Finchley, two bumblebees are collecting pollen from Mahonia- these are not queens, but workers. The nests of buff-tailed bumblebees sometimes survive throughout the winter these days – normally all the adults except the queens, who hibernate, die. But you can clearly see the pollen in the leg baskets in the second photo – a queen at this time of year would just be gathering nectar to keep herself fed until she started laying eggs in the spring. These workers still have a nest to go back to, and if we don’t have severe weather, who knows but that they might survive right through? The impacts of climate change are unpredictable, for sure.